MACCYD - archetype of heart sound database for biomedical application

Abstract

Although diagnosis of heart sound by auscultation is simple and inexpensive method, it is so complex and nonstationary which make it difficult to understand. And the sounds are inherently hard to decipher because they are faint and lay at the lower end of the audible frequency range. Furthermore, the sounds of the heart are difficult to discriminate because they are separated from one another by less than 30 ms—an exceedingly short time for human analysis. It has been reported that a significant percentage of medical school graduates cannot properly use a stethoscope for diagnosing common heart conditions [1]. Numerous studies have shown that extremely high percentages (as much as 87 %) of patients referred to cardiologists for evaluation have benign murmurs [2]. In other words, the general practitioner (GP) heard something, but a followup examination showed that it wasn't anything to get excited about.